Programming
The decision by the Ant development team to put the junit task archive (ant-junit.jar) into Ant's lib directory without the junit archive is maybe convenient but caused me to waste some time to figure out why the same Ant script works on my box but not on my coworker's box. Both solutions outline on Ant's FAQ have their drawbacks and I think that this is another example where convenience is a good source to waste them on the long haul.
I am always surprised when someone tells me that he/she does not know how to implement conditional compilation in Java. Here I want to describe a way to implement it. I did not invent this but took the idea from JBoss but I refined it here to accomplish some additional feature like still have regular Java code.
As with every tool the debugger is only useful when used appropriately. Based on my experience many developers tend to overuse it and forget that for some problems it does not help at all like with race conditions, class loading etc. A debugger is like a telescope narrowing down my view so that navigating becomes difficult and developers lose their view on the big picture and therefore waste a lot of time locating the problem and then fixing the symptom instead of the cause. But there are other tools available that can be as or even more efficient as a debugger.
